The evolving human condition

Human technological civilization existed on the planet for ten thousand years, and has had an effect strong enough all around for this period to be called the Antropocene by Nobel Prize winning chemist Paul Krutzen. It is not exactly clear how people lived twenty or thirty thousand years ago, with idealistic views about communal sharing of food contrasting with others based on a bloody in teeth and claw view of nature.

When agriculture was invented, the surplus of food produced started the demographic explosion, and enabled the differentiation of roles in society, beyond those imposed by gender alone. There is almost universal consensus on how for a long time this change represented a worsening of the living conditions of most of the humans.

It has been a long journey, until we’ve been able to fully leverage the knowledge that was being acquired, and until the more complex but more useful methods of collecting, and sharing knowledge themselves have been learned, and applied.

For many people it used to appear that the process somehow might have reached an apex, that we stopped finding new challenges, or needing new knowledge. Famously even those who should have known better, like Thomas Kelvin on physics, or Hilbert on mathematics, from time to time declared that Humanity was more or less done. More recently, it has become more difficult to make that claim: philosophically due to Gödel opening up endless scientific paths; economically due to so many people needing help; existentially due to our radically expanding astronomical horizons; and foremost because of the undeniable acceleration of technological applications, and their more and more visible impact on the daily lives of billions of people.

So what is going to happen? How will Humanity change? How will humans change, to adapt to a world that is shaped by their technological creations? Can we muster the collective courage, and preserve our acquired freedoms, or extend them even further, while this change bring us to unexplored territories needing radically new adaptations, and definitions of what is to be human?

Humanity+ (humanity plus, or H+), the world transhumanist association, a non-profit action tank, is dedicated to proactively explore the space of possible answers to these, and other questions. Without pollyannaishly naive optimism, but with a rational, non-zero sum technological cost/benefit analysis, unclouded by dogmatic prescriptions, the organization is bound to provoke. Provoke thought, hopefully action, explore policy, and opportunity in shaping what Humanity has the opportunity to become, and understanding what level of strength, dedication, and determination is going to be required to make sure that this spectrum of opportunities is fully explored, and the most fruitful ones are chosen, and implemented by all those who are ready to shape the future.

Ray Kurzweil is speaking about his forthcoming book “How The Mind Works, And How To Build One”, with all new supporting materials. Stephen Wolfram is going to talk about “Computation And The Future Of The Human Condition”. There’ll be robots (!), dogs (!?), a Transhumorist, and it is so sure, lots, and lots of fun…

Even the tag cloud of the topics of the conference is the coolest collection of mind-bending memes:

Full disclosure: I have been recently elected Chairman of Humanity+, and am helping Executive Director, and Summit Chair Alex Lightman with the organization of the H+ Summit conference.